Thirty Years of The Network Scale up Method

11/25/2020
by   Ian Laga, et al.
0

Estimating the size of hard-to-reach populations is an important problem for many fields. The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is a relatively new approach to estimate the size of these hard-to-reach populations by asking respondents the question, "How many X's do you know," where X is the population of interest (e.g. "How many female sex workers do you know?"). The answers to these questions form Aggregated Relational Data (ARD). The NSUM has been used to estimate the size of a variety of subpopulations, including female sex workers, drug users, and even children who have been hospitalized for choking. Within the Network Scale-up methodology, there are a multitude of estimators for the size of the hidden population, including direct estimators, maximum likelihood estimators, and Bayesian estimators. In this article, we first provide an in-depth analysis of ARD properties and the techniques to collect the data. Then, we comprehensively review different estimation methods in terms of the assumptions behind each model, the relationships between the estimators, and the practical considerations of implementing the methods. Finally, we provide a summary of the dominant methods and an extensive list of the applications, and discuss the open problems and potential research directions in this area.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/18/2021

A sample size heuristic for network scale-up studies

The network scale-up method (NSUM) is a survey-based method for estimati...
research
05/07/2023

The Role of Scaling and Estimating the Degree Ratio in the Network Scale-up Method

The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) uses social networks and answers to "...
research
04/12/2018

Fast approaches for Bayesian estimation of size of hard-to-reach populations using Network Scale-up

The Network scale-up method is commonly used to overcome difficulties in...
research
09/21/2021

A Correlated Network Scale-up Model: Finding the Connection Between Subpopulations

Aggregated relational data (ARD), formed from "How many X's do you know?...
research
11/20/2022

Consistent least squares estimation in population-size-dependent branching processes

We consider discrete-time parametric population-size-dependent branching...
research
08/14/2018

Estimating the size of a hidden finite set: large-sample behavior of estimators

A finite set is "hidden" if its elements are not directly enumerable or ...
research
12/15/2019

Modeling the marked presence-only data: a case study of estimating the female sex worker size in Malawi

Continued fine-scale mapping of HIV/AIDS populations is needed to meet g...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset